Marvin Opler

This landmark study hinted at widespread stresses induced by urban life, as well as contributing to the development of the burgeoning field of social psychiatry in the 1950s.

From 1943 until 1946, Opler worked as a Community Analyst at the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, where his critical views of the internment of Japanese Americans later led him to co-author Impounded Peoples in 1946.

His records included an account of "The November Incident," a protest by the residents of the camp which resulted in the takeover of Tule Lake by the US Army.

Author Barney Shallit remembered Marvin Opler at Tule Lake both fondly and vividly: "with his heavy red beard and his slow, deliberate movements, he looked ... like a benign, giant panda."

Marvin Opler noted the parallels between the revival of traditional Japanese culture among the largely acculturated internees at Tule Lake and the spread of the Ghost Dance religion among Plains Indian tribes in the 19th century.

Historian Peter Suzuki writes that most of the anthropologists who worked for the War Relocation Authority (WRA) accepted the government's action of interning the Japanese Americans as morally justified.

Opler was impressed by the work of George Tamura, a Japanese American artist who spent his teenage years imprisoned at Tule Lake.

Marvin Opler also co-authored an article on Senryū folk poetry with another internee, F. Obayashi, which was published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1945.

After the internment camps were closed, Opler taught anthropology and sociology at various colleges, including Occidental, Stanford, Harvard, and Tulane from 1946 until 1952.

In this affidavit, he stated that, rather than being acts of free will, it was coercion, duress, and mass compulsion that motivated many of the wartime renouncements of citizenship by Japanese Americans.

It was in 1952 that Opler joined the Midtown Community Mental Health Research Study (New York), which hinted at widespread stresses and psychopathology among city-dwellers.

That same year, Marvin Opler toured the psychiatric hospitals of Moscow with his wife Charlotte and fellow anthropologist Robert F. Spencer.

In December 1935, the same year that he earned his degree from the University of Michigan, Marvin Opler married vocational specialist and student counselor Charlotte Fox, who subsequently became involved in biological research, Japanese-American rights, and environmental activism.

Lewis Opler (1948-2018) was a psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist who co-authored the PANSS, a symptom severity rating scale widely used in the study of psychosis.

He also contributed to many professional journals and held the following positions: Marvin K. Opler's papers and correspondence are primarily housed in the Columbia University Health Sciences Library Archives [3].